| Grade Level | Required | Optional | Recommended | Optional |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall K | Phoneme, Letter | Word, Sentence | RAN, Visual Processing | Picture Vocab |
| Winter K | Phoneme, Letter | Word, Sentence | RAN, Visual Processing | Picture Vocab |
| Spring K | Phoneme, Letter, Word | Sentence | RAN, Visual Processing | Picture Vocab |
| 1 | Phoneme, Word, Sentence | Letter | RAN, Visual Processing | Picture Vocab |
| 2 | Word, Sentence | Phoneme, Letter | RAN, Visual Processing | Picture Vocab, Written Vocab, Morphology, Syntax |
| 3-5 | Word, Sentence | Phoneme, Letter | RAN, Visual Processing | Picture Vocab, Written Vocab, Morphology, Syntax |
| 6-12 | Word, Sentence | RAN, Visual Processing | Written Vocab, Morphology, Syntax |
2 ROAR Assessment Suites
2.1 Foundational Reading Skills
Mastering the code of written language such that text can be fluently decoded into sound and meaning is the foundation of literacy. Several decades of reading research have shown that phonemic awareness, word decoding, and fluency are three of the most important foundational reading skills all readers need to master (Point et al. 2004). Foundational reading skills are also the bottleneck for children with dyslexia who struggle to learn letter-sound correspondences and decoding skills early in elementary school and typically have continued struggles with reading fluency. The ROAR Foundational Reading Skills Suite assesses the collection of skills that are at the foundation of reading development and also represent the major challenges for students with dyslexia.
Foundational reading skills initially develop in parallel and become increasingly integrated, with each skill building upon the foundation provided by the other skills. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to identify and manipulate the sounds that make up spoken words. In an alphabetic script like English where letters represent sounds that are blended together to form words, phonological awareness is a critical foundational skill. Phonemes are the building blocks of spoken language just as letters are the building blocks of written language - a young reader’s challenge is building the connections between the two. Recognizing and manipulating the sounds in words is the foundation of the ability to connect sounds to letters and syllables, which is critical for learning to decode increasingly complex words. Down the road, it is important in helping children learn new words they encounter in print. Phonological Awareness (ROAR-Phoneme) measures the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in the beginning, middle, and end of words (Gijbels et al. 2024).
Phonological awareness typically develops alongside letter sound knowledge, or the ability to map sounds to letters, and letters to sounds, which is assessed by ROAR-Letter. With the development of phonological awareness and letter sound knowledge, children begin learning to crack the code of written language, decode text to sound, and read words.
Building on this foundation, children develop word-level decoding skills and automaticity, which are essential for success in reading individual words Perfetti (1985). Decoding is the ability to translate a word from print to speech using the knowledge of how letters represent sounds. Basically, it is the ability to sound out a word accurately. Automaticity is the fast, effortless word recognition of words by sight. These skills go hand in hand: decoding knowledge supports the development of automaticity in word reading. Single-Word Reading (ROAR-Word) measures the complexity of words that a student can read with automaticity, from simple consonant-vowel-consonant words like “cat”, to complex, multi-syllabic words like “heterogeneity” (Yeatman et al. 2021). Reading connected text is much more than decoding a sequence of words in isolation; reading sentences efficiently and fluently is critical for comprehension of more complicated texts. Sentence Reading Efficiency (ROAR-Sentence) assesses this skill. ROAR Foundational Reading Skills is a composite of ROAR-Phoneme (Gijbels et al. 2024) (see Chapter 7), ROAR-Letter (see Chapter 8), ROAR-Word (Yeatman et al. 2021) (see Chapter 5), and ROAR-Sentence (Tran et al. 2023) (see Chapter 6).
2.2 Dyslexia Screening and Subtyping
Developmental dyslexia is an impairment in foundational reading skills. Whereas most children who are provided systematic and structured reading instruction are able to master phonological awareness, letter-sound correspondences, and decoding early in elementary school, children with dyslexia struggle to develop these skills and require substantially more support. For people with dyslexia reading efficiency can remain a challenge throughout life. Thus, the ROAR Foundational Reading Skills Suite (ROAR-Phoneme, ROAR-Letter, ROAR-Word, and ROAR-Sentence) serves as a reliable and accurate index of the reading challenges associated with dyslexia (Section 9.1).
Additionally, dyslexia is associated with other challenges, including Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) and various aspects of visual processing. Thus, in addition to the Foundational Reading Skills Suite, ROAR contains additional measures that have been designed to characterize other challenges that are common in people with dyslexia. These additional measures are useful for both predicting children’s struggles with reading development as well as characterizing differences that might contribute to or exacerbate reading challenges. To provide further context regarding a reader’s skills, additional measures available with ROAR include RAN, Visual Processing, Vocabulary, and more (Section 9.2).
2.3 Developmental Appropriateness of Dyslexia Screening Assessments
Phonological and phonemic awareness, knowledge of letter names, and letter sounds knowledge, are foundational reading skills that are precursors to word-level decoding. Assessments of these skills (ROAR-Phoneme and ROAR-Letter) can predict later challenges with reading. For this reason, these assessments are appropriate for children in the fall of Kindergarten, even when their prior education in reading is unknown. In addition, rapid automatized naming, visual processing, and picture vocabulary can be assessed prior to receiving any reading instruction.
As students progress through the grades and have more experience with reading, the use case for these measures changes. For example, not only does phonological awareness predict later reading skills, but the process of learning to read also influences the development of phonological awareness skills. For older students ROAR-Phoneme still provides useful information about gaps in phonological awareness which are useful for planning instruction, but ROAR-Phoneme is no longer necessary as an indicator of dyslexia risk because reading skills can be directly measured. The same is true for ROAR-Letter: if a teacher has concerns that a student still has gaps in letter-sound knowledg, ROAR-Letter can always provide useful information but it is not a necessary part of dyslexia screening after students have more than a year of experience with reading instruction.
Once students have received substantial, consistent, systematic instruction and practice in word-level decoding from a high-quality curriculum that follows a scope and sequence for at least 6 months, it is appropriate to assess their risk for dyslexia with a measure of word-level decoding (ROAR-Word). Provided they have received substantial instruction in word-level decoding, students K-12 can be assessed for dyslexia risk with ROAR-Word with accuracy, reliability, and validity. Because children entering Kindergarten vary widely in pre-Kindergarten educational experiences, we do not recommend relying on ROAR-Word when assessing for dyslexia risk until spring of Kindergarten. However, ROAR-Word can be used to rule out risk of dyslexia for incoming Kindergartners who score at or above the 50th percentile. It would be appropriate to use ROAR-Word to determine instructional supports for Kindergartners in the fall of Kindergarten, however, it should not be assumed that a new Kindergartner with a low score on ROAR-Word is necessarily at risk of dyslexia. ROAR-Word is a child-friendly assessment with stories and characters that young children can enjoy. For older students, the emphasis on story and characters is reduced, as is developmentally appropriate.
ROAR-Sentence is part of an accurate, reliable, and valid dyslexia screener for students in Grades 1-12. Similar to decoding skills, reading fluency builds on the foundations that come before it, and it would be appropriate to assess students in reading fluency (ROAR-Sentence) after they have received substantial, consistent, systematic instruction and practice in sentence reading from a high-quality curriculum that follows a scope and sequence for at least 6 months. A low score in ROAR-Sentence prior to receiving any instruction in reading is not a valid risk indicator of dyslexia. For this reason, we recommend assessing students with ROAR-Sentence beginning in the fall of Grade 1. However, if a Kindergartener enters Kindergarten with substantial prior education in reading, ROAR-Sentence can be used to rule out risk of dyslexia in the fall of Kindergarten.
By grade-level, these are the assessments recommended in the ROAR Foundational Reading Skills Suite for use as a dyslexia screener:
References
Ehri, Linnea C. 2005. “Learning to Read Words: Theory, Findings, and Issues.” Sci. Stud. Read. 9 (2): 167–88.
Gijbels, Liesbeth, Amy Burkhardt, Wanjing Anya Ma, and Jason D Yeatman. 2024. “Rapid Online Assessment of Reading and Phonological Awareness (ROAR-PA).” Sci. Rep. 14 (1): 1–16.
Perfetti, Charles A. 1985. “Reading Ability” 282.
Point, Learning et al. 2004. “A Closer Look at the Five Essential Components of Effective Reading Instruction: A Review of Scientifically Based Reading Research for Teachers.” Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates.
Tran, Jasmine E, Jason D Yeatman, Amy Burkhardt, Wanjing A Ma, Jamie Mitchell, Maya Yablonski, Liesbeth Gijbels, Carrie Townley-Flores, and Adam Richie-Halford. 2023. “Development and Validation of a Rapid Online Sentence Reading Efficiency Assessment.”
Yeatman, Jason D, Kenny An Tang, Patrick M Donnelly, Maya Yablonski, Mahalakshmi Ramamurthy, Iliana I Karipidis, Sendy Caffarra, et al. 2021. “Rapid Online Assessment of Reading Ability.” Sci. Rep. 11 (1): 6396.